Alberto Apollaro

Website for CONICET´s academic publications

Alberto Apollaro

Abstract

In recent decades the progress of new technologies has favoured and facilitated the presentation of information resources in digital supports. Consequently, the number of online academic journals has rapidly formed a critical mass which demands specific methods and procedures for the organization and dissemination of content.

These documents, in common with other digital or digitalised documents, need to be presented online in an organized manner and be easily accessible, so that users can gain the advantages of these resources. Portals, digital libraries and institutional repositories, among others, constitute forms of organization which require selection, evaluation, registry and systemization of information resources in digital format, ensuring their persistence over time and local or remote access by the scientific community or general users of this information.

With the object of contributing to portals, digital libraries and institutional repositories constituting organization forms that require the selection, evaluation, registry and systemization of information resources in digital format, preserving their integrity, ensuring their permanence in time and offering local or remote access to the scientific community and information users in general, the CAICyT (Argentinian Centre of Scientific and Technological Information) has presented a proposal to the CONICET (National Council of Scientific and Technical Research) for the creation of a portal-based electronic publisher to compile collections of digital items with the CONICET seal of quality and peer-reviewed academic content.

To carry out this initiative, the use of open source, Open Journal System (OJS) software is proposed, developed by the Public Knowledge Project, as this software allows online centralization of management and control of the complete cycle of publishing an electronic journal, the procurement of statistical data to evaluate the behaviour of publications, their impact and the integral online process as a resource for communication among the main actors in this cycle (author-publisher-evaluator).

This cycle begins with self-archiving, whereby the author directly uploads his or her article to the platform. The article is then peer-reviewed, the style is corrected and the documents presented for definitive online publishing.

The CAICyT will be responsible for advising publishers on guidelines for improving the quality of their publications, platform implementation and administration and approving or rejecting the titles selected.

It is hoped that the implementation of the OJS will increase visibility and give hierarchical structure to Argentinian academic publications, favouring the scientific communication in the region, facilitating the transmission of research results, providing immediate access to information through the online publishing of complete texts, reducing time spent publishing and recovering content, reducing publishing and distribution costs and providing unlimited information storage, with multimedia tools to recover text, images and sound.